We have run our marriage this way since before there was a word for it

We started this in the nineteen nineties with no vocabulary, no books we could find and nobody at all to ask, and for the first decade we called it nothing. When the words eventually arrived we discovered we had been doing a recognisable thing the whole time, which was oddly deflating. We had rather thought we invented it.

Sixty three and sixty six, north Jersey, married thirty eight years, thirty one of them with me in charge of the household. Two children long grown, one of whom has worked it out and does not mind.

What we would like is to talk to couples in their thirties and forties. Not to advise, particularly, since most of what we did was wrong for years and corrected itself slowly. More because everything written about this describes the first two years, and we are living in the thirty first, and somebody ought to say what that is like: undramatic, entirely load bearing, and the reason we are still married.

We are also frank that our own circle has thinned. Two couples we did this alongside have died and one has moved to be near grandchildren, and that is simply what happens.

Not looking for a third, not looking to play with anybody, not looking to attend anything at all. Not looking to be treated as a curiosity, though we understand the impulse. Not looking for anybody who wants taking on formally, because we have neither the energy nor the arrogance for it.